“We keep the servers going … and much more”: Recent highlights from our Technology department – Wikimedia Blog

"Running the servers is only a fraction of the technical and community work that the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technology department does every day. Here’s who we are, along with a few snapshots of our work.

The most important responsibility of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technology department is to “keep the servers running”: to operate the computers that provide Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites.

But running the servers is only a fraction of the work our eighty-person team does. The Technology department also provides a variety of other essential services and platforms to the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation and to the public. In this post, we’ll introduce you to all of the programs that make up the Technology department, and highlight some of our work from the past year.

The 18 members of the Technical Operations team maintain the servers and run the wikis.  Over the last year, the team delivered an uptime of 99.97% (according to independent monitoring) across all wikis. The team also practiced switching the wikis back and forth between data centers, so that the sites are resilient in case of site failure.  This year, they performed the second ever switchover from primary to secondary data center and back, and more than doubled the speed of the switchover (more information)...."